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Beyond the bricks: Working in the brickyard

Jeffrey Kerbel has turned Brampton Brick into the second largest producer in the country.

Artiste brick by Brampton Brick looks like stone but but is a lot cheapter to install.
(SUPPLIED PHOTO)

By Kevin MacLeanSpecial to the Star

Fri., April 8, 2011

Jeffrey Kerbel is thinking out loud.

The walls in the lobby of his company’s headquarters are papered with dozens of plaques and framed pictures commending Brampton Brick for its philanthropy and financial support of community organizations — from charity fundraisers to minor sports teams.

It’s hockey season and the Maple Leafs have tantalized fans with the dream of a playoff race. The conversation turns to hockey and the huge cost of outfitting growing kids for the national pastime.

“What about a huge equipment swap or sale?” Kerbel muses. “We could collect people’s unwanted and unneeded hockey gear and make it available to those who really need it.”

A former minor hockey coach, he has bags of equipment stashed away from when his boys played. He’s not alone.

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“We might need a warehouse for a month or so,” he tells Judy Pryma, Brampton Brick’s vice president of sales. It might just be blue-skying, but the wheels are turning . . .

Thinking big is nothing new for Kerbel.

Under his stewardship, Brampton Brick has steadily grown from a small, family-run business into a major player, a public company — its tentacles spread across Canada and into the United States.

Once the Number 11 brick producer in the country, the company now ranks second. “Not because we were so good,” the 58-year-old CEO says with a note of self-deprecation. “We were just so small, we weren’t worth acquiring.”

With mergers and buyouts and closings, “all of a sudden almost everyone else was gone,” but Brampton Brick was still plugging away.

Now, its monstrous 400,000-square-foot Wanless Dr. facility is “the biggest brick plant under one roof in North America.”

The company employees about 250 workers, many of them on staff for 25 years or more. Only a fraction of the workforce is needed to run the highly automated plant, as technically advanced as many automotive assembly lines — there’s just a lot more dust.

In what were once fields surrounding the headquarters, thousands of suburban homes have sprouted — and most of them are clad in Brampton Brick’s bricks. Not surprising since the company claims about 50 per cent of the Ontario market, none too shabby for the kid from Bathurst and Lawrence.

Between its operations here and in the United States, the company churns out the equivalent of more than 1 million bricks — every day. That’s a lot of clay for a lot of homes.

About 60 years ago, Kerbel’s father, Allan, and three partners bought a small existing brick producer from the Packham family. With some upgrades, it had soon tripled its output to 6 million bricks a year. As the market for brick homes grew in the 1960s, so did Brampton Brick and before long it was pumping out more than 25 million bricks annually — a far cry from the 400 million produced today.

Kerbel’s initiation into the building business came at his father’s side.

In high school, occasionally he’d skip classes on Friday afternoons to join his dad at Mastro’s Restaurant on Wilson Ave. near Dufferin St. It was the late ’60s and many of the young up-and-coming builders and developers would hang out there.

They’d talk shop. Everybody was small then. Subdivisions were unpretentious. Some projects just a half-dozen homes. For starters.

“They’d talk about areas to be developed,” Kerbel recalls. “My job was to shut up, sit and listen. I learned more in that restaurant” than any classroom.

It was an invaluable experience. “You don’t realize you’re getting an education that’s as important as anything you’ll ever learn.”

He obviously paid attention and did his homework.

As a teenager, he spent a few summers in the brickyard but a nearby farm at Bovaird and Hurontario beckoned. Milking cows and doing chores left an indelible impression — and inspired a love of animals.

At prestigious Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., he studied engineering for two years. But it wasn’t for him. He traded the Ivy League for the University of Guelph and became a veterinarian, specializing in large animals.

“I think that all came from working on the farm,” Kerbel recalls. “It was wonderful being a vet, a lot like being a doctor. Lots of routine cases and maybe one in 10 is really complex and challenging.”

Still, a part of him suspected he’d be pulled back to the brickyard in some capacity. That day came after his dad’s brother — one of the partners in Brampton Brick — fell ill and Kerbel’s father asked: “Are you tired of playing with the cows yet?”

Kerbel was 30, had finished vet school and practiced in the Markdale area for about three years. But the time was right. He became a company director.

“I always knew I would work with my father, not for my father,” he says.

The brick business fascinated him. “The great thing about manufacturing is it’s quick. You’re making something.”

If you’re a developer, “you better have hobbies,” Kerbel notes. “Development moves at the speed of a snail. Most pieces of land have a bar mitzvah, for God’s sake.”

That pace didn’t deter Kerbel. While manufacturing is his “passion,” he’s also been a developer and a builder, through Andrin Homes and other ventures.

For more than two decades, he and Peter Smith have been partners in Andrin. Their current projects include Cathedraltown in Markham and the Berwick luxury condos near Yonge and Eglinton.

Smith, a mover and shaker in his own right, is the former chairman of GO Transit, an is now vice chairman of Metrolinx, the overseer agency for transit in the GTA. The pair met while Smith was Peel Region’s housing commissioner.

“No one I’ve met in business has a quicker mind for concepts and numbers and an ability to grasp the bottom line, than Jeff,” says Smith, who also sits on the board of Brampton Brick. “He can see the ‘end’ more quickly than some people can sort out the beginning of the process.”

And Kerbel has carried on his father’s legacy of contributing his time, talent and resources to the community here and in Israel, Smith notes. Now the third generation of the family is getting involved, as two of Kerbel’s three sons, Adam and Justin, work for the Kerbel Group and Andrin respectively. Son Jessie is continuing his education.

The brickyard’s latest addition is a product line he hopes will revolutionize the industry.

The Elegante line, which combines “the elegance of stone with the simplicity of brick,” was developed in-house. It’s a product of the philosophy that “anyone can have input into what we do and how we do it,” Kerbel says. “There are no rigid structures. There’s no bureaucracy here. If we have to, we’ll turn on a dime.”

One of the guys in Brampton Brick’s onsite lab had the notion that maybe the company could produce a clay brick that looks like stone. A year later, Elegante was a reality.

Stone is about double the price of brick but the new line is right in the middle cost-wise. And stone masons love it, Kerbel says.

Hugh Heron, the irrepressible 73-year-old Scot who founded Heathwood Homes and the conglomerate the Heron Group, is an industry heavyweight. And he’s a big booster of Kerbel’s.

Like many in the GTA’s interconnected building business, “We’re friendly competitors with a lot of respect for each other,” he says.

The two were also longtime workout buddies at the old Fitness Institute. Kerbel isn’t an imposing figure — medium height and build. But there’s a touch of awe in Heron’s voice as he recalls the day a few years back when his pal bench pressed 455 pounds — easily more than twice his body weight.

“He made it look so easy,” says Heron, who’s no slouch, having benched 365 pounds — at age 60. “The bottom line with Jeff is he’s done boxing, done salsa dancing. He really gets involved in trying to keep himself fit. He’s quite the competitor and the competition is with himself.”

It’s the sort of drive and determination that’s helped the small brick producer tucked away in a nondescript corner of Brampton to become an industry leader.

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